Although formally trained in literary/cultural studies and rhetoric with significant forays into critical theory broadly construed, I work across a number of fields and disciplines, often zooming out of the objects of study to consider larger networks, systems, and connections, and simultaneously zooming in on specifics and particulars to interrogate issues of pressing concern. My interdisciplinary approaches are catalyzed by the conviction that the most fundamental questions are best probed into not within the constraints imposed by established disciplinary parameters but outside of them. This page lists the research tracks on which I’m currently working on various projects.
Constitution of the Biodigital Life [This is likely to be a sustained graduate research project culminating in a dissertation. It aims to consider a cluster of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary and media objects in the Anglophone tradition in conjunction with developments in computer science and cognitive neurosciences in order to study the emergence of a new form of life in literature and media alongside its real-world counterparts in life-extension laboratory facilities and tech-firms whose substrate is neither fully carbon nor fully silicon. The project is invested in interrogating and understanding questions of mediation, technics, epiphylogenesis, biomedicine, and the constitution of the biodigital life in parallel with the increasing exteriorization of human cognition over the past seventy-five years, afforded by advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, from the Turing machine to the transformer architecture in LLM.]
Medical Geographies of Colonial Assam [I’m reading a wide range of materials—reports by British medical officers, articles of various types in Assamese magazines and periodicals, works of fiction dealing with medicine and health in the region—to gain a better understanding of the intersection of health and medicine in this part of India, where I was born and where I lived for about three decades of my life.]
Colonialism, Hunting, and India’s Northeast [I’m working on an article on the relationship between hunting and resource extraction in the Undivided Assam. Figures of interest include nitib shikaris (native hunters) like Tarun Ram Phukan and Prasannalal Choudhury, and European hunters like Frank Nicholls and Patrick Hanley, who operated in the region.]
Speculative Fiction in Assamese. [I’m interested in the rich history of speculative fiction in Assamese, which begins in the Abahana period, and am currently building a website dedicated to it. I’m also working on a public-facing piece that traces the genealogy of writings in Assamese on gerontology and life extention.]
CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS
[For published work see the Publications page]
“Storying Worlds of Radical Alterity: The Self and the Other in the Fiction of Life Extension.” Stanford-Berkeley English Graduate Conference, Stanford University. April 22-23, 2023. [Presented virtually]
“Impermanence and Creative Assimilation: Notes Toward an Episteme of the Ephemeral.” 17th Annual Madison Literature and Language Graduate Conference, University of Wisconsin-Madison. April 16, 2023. [Presented virtually]
“From Mnémotechnique to Mnemotechnology: Forgetting and Recall in the Digital Ecology.” Annual International Conference of the Indian Network for Memory Studies (INMS): “Memory in a Digital Age,” Centre for Memory Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai. August 23-25, 2022.